Saturday, July 26, 2008

R.I.P Series- 14

When one has observed the world for a few decades, as I have done, and as closely as I have, one realises that many of the devices that one had seen around the house in one’s childhood have either disappeared completely, or the functionality resides now in a completely different form or style.

The phones with the rotary dial (some without even the dial) were pensioned off and replaced with button-types, and later the cordless ones, and more recently the mobile phones. The humble mechanical type-writer gave way to the electronic one and later to the word processors, laptops and what-not. The bicycles of today, mercifully, still have two wheels, but look far more fancier now – though some relics of the past still exist. Spectacles have taken on new shapes and new materials and, in many cases, have been substituted with contact lens.

Watches have stuck to their analog dials, warding off the brief threat from the digital types, but the mechanism is completely different. You don’t have to ‘key’ them or ‘shake them’ to make them work. And, while fountain pens are still around, ball points and micro-tips are far more ubiquitous.

Two devices that I always felt have held their own and weathered the onslaught of progress are the nail-clipper and the stapler. If a person who had slipped into a coma in the sixties were to magically wake up today, he would struggle to recognise most of the contraptions strewn around, but the bulb of recognition will light up when he sees the nail-clipper or the stapler. And, for all you know, the light of recognition will not be from a bulb but from a CFL or LED lamp.

True, there have been attempts to spruce up the image of the stapler with more elegance and styling, but, for me, the style represented by Kangaro Model 10 has always been the one that comes to my mind when I think of a stapler. In fact, much of the iron content in my blood has come from the staple pins that shopkeepers would have thoughtfully used to close a packet of chips or masala peanuts and that would have dropped inside and mixed with the contents as I hurriedly tore open the packets to get my greedy hands in.

Alas, the days of the stapler are numbered, if we are to believe this post ( shared by Sowmya). The pin-type stapler model is on its way out. Welcome, the stitch variety.